


Beyond The Sea

by sol_sikke



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Drama, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-09-13 11:31:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16891788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sol_sikke/pseuds/sol_sikke
Summary: Shepard's chosen to destroy the Reapers, and in the wake of the blast, she knows she hasn't got long to live. It's still a question as to where she's going to end up—at the bar or across the sea—but in these last moments there are a few memories to visit on the way.AU/retelling, set along the course of ME2 and ME3, with a little bit added after. Romantic Thane/Shepard with an emphasis on a Garrus/Shepard friendship.





	1. Chapter 1

Shepard remembers the moment when her death stopped hurting, when she first stopped feeling the awful, seeping wetness between her ribs that seemed to be spreading with alarming speed, dripping like some horrific, slow waterfall and cementing her skin to her undersuit in the process.

The wounds peppering nearly every inch of her arms, torso, and legs had become a painful matrix of exposed flesh and fabric, the mesh of the suit melding together with blood that was trying desperately to clot, and Shepard had found herself at the painful mercy of a body that didn’t know when to give up, that didn’t understand when the end was so imminently, unavoidably close. Since her final run towards the beam, towards the Citadel and the Catalyst—that unnerving creature made of shimmers and light like ripples in a pool—she had fallen into a cycle of her wounds sealing to the suit and being opened again, sealing, ripping open, sealing, ripping open. 

It is halfway through the Catalyst’s speech that the mental fog of shock begins to set in, and Shepard can feel her faculties slipping. Its words ring out and she tries to interpret them as best she can, trying to siphon away agenda to lay the facts bare before her. All she wants is for the war to end, and now, at the most critical and pivotal point, Shepard is beginning to shut down. 

Something about the adrenaline or the shock or some combination of the two is taking the pain further and further away from her now, a hand reaching into the jagged seams of her wounds and removing the sharp, heated coals that rested there only moments ago. With each passing minute, Shepard’s body is composed less of agony and more of a numb kind of static. 

The Catalyst is still speaking, always speaking, its every other word a statement of fact, its every remaining syllable an agent of manipulation. Shepard is trying so desperately hard to fight the shock, but every breath sends exhausted lungs bumping against a sharp rib or two, and consciousness is beginning to slip.

The childlike being speaks for ages—infinite, awful ages that lapse into the silence of choice as the sounds of battle and death wage outside. For Shepard, the attempts at subtle coercion aren’t even the worst of it: It’s the form this thing has taken on. The form of someone she’d watched go down under the quick and ruthless barrage of a Reaper’s beam, the form of yet another someone she hadn’t been able to save. 

Every death had haunted her, in its own time and its own way.

Going into the mess when it was the most crowded, hoping to hear the raucous jokes and discussions of those who were just trying to fight their war and retain some shred of sanity along the way, hoping the distractions would keep the memories at bay, and swearing for a minute she’d heard Ashley’s voice among the boisterous laughs. 

Roaming the ship at night when only the skeleton crew would be awake, walking laps to try and encourage some semblance of fatigue, passing by the lab and hearing the ghosts of Mordin’s frequent hums and murmurs to himself. 

Nightmares of Thessia and the Reaper’s descent, of the mechanical whir and the screams that followed, only to jerk awake in a cold sweat and thinking for a split second she saw Thane lurking in the shadows of her cabin, standing at attention.

Even Legion’s final question— _“does this unit have a soul?”_ —had dealt her an unexpectedly painful blow. Watching him orchestrate his own end with a precise kind of accuracy that betrayed far more acceptance than just simple indifference had sent her into a furious quiet spell where, other than dispensing terse orders, her lips were pressed together for fear if she let them part, she would either rage at anyone who gave her have a chance or she’d down her weight in whiskey, and now was no time to get drunk. 

But this child? This child had been different. Perhaps more innocent than all the others she’d lost. Known for the least amount of time, sure, but also the most blameless. It was impossible to label him as a soldier, to categorize his death as someone giving their life in the line of duty. This had been somebody’s son. Somebody’s little boy. And there’s something deeply unsettling in having its image explain to Shepard that she is—almost quite literally—holding the world in her hands. 

The Catalyst stands, finally silent, a cool and otherworldly indifference in its eyes. Shepard turns away, and there is no question in her mind as to the choice that must be made. Her steps begin slow, her gait uneven. 

She wishes she could run. 

Every precious second the Catalyst had wasted talking to her, imparting its philosophies along with the bare bones information that she needed, countless more had died. Even now, as Shepard staggers towards the conduit, the buzzing in her own head is interspersed with the staccato of gunship fire, the vindictive buzz of a Reaper's beam, and the ensuing cacophony of exploding vessels. 

Vessels that had been fighting to buy her time. 

_Faster._

She tries to push herself into a run—though it amounts to little more than a power walk—and the pain draws closer once again, prowling nearer with teeth bared as Shepard forces her arm to cooperate. She isn’t ready for the gun to weigh as much as it does, nor is she ready for the instantaneous, white hot pain that ricochets along her fractured bones when the recoil of the weapon nearly throws her off balance again. 

The protective glass surrounding the conduit is thick and durable, and the first couple of shots do nothing but weaken the barrier. The sound of cracking glass infuriates Shepard, and she aims the pistol once again, unleashing a barrage of shots as fast as her weak and wounded hands will allow. Every bullet takes down another phantom version of Leng, another of the Collectors that decimated her crew, but it doesn’t bring back any of the lost, and she fears it might not be enough to save those that remain. 

Between shots, Shepard hears another loud crack, and the spider web fissure in the glass suddenly reaches outward, spreading along with exponentially increasing speed. She levels her pistol at the power conduit. Aims for the center of the web. Fires. And fires again.

The last bullet in her clip punctures the conduit. The explosion throws her backwards, and that’s the last of what she remembers. 

Somewhere infinitely far away, her pain exists in synchronicity with an abrasive combination of noise and heat and the terrible sensation of falling as the conduit overloads and the structure begins to tear itself to pieces. Yet for the horror of it all, there is a finality to Shepard's situation that brings her a kind of relief. She’d fought till the end. Even as something slams into her legs, even as something else gashes across her face, Shepard begins to know a kind of peace. 

The last thought she has before the sounds fade out altogether is the curiosity as to where she will end up, or if there’s even any place to go to. Her mind pulls back to her team, back to the ones who had become her family over these finite years and infinite struggles, and Garrus’s questioning of their respective afterlives comes to her again. 

Turian heaven may or may not be the same as hers, but, regardless, he’d better not be there to meet her at the bar. If that’s where she’s destined to end up, Shepard damn well hopes she’ll be drinking alone. 

The next thought brings a significantly different kind of pain, different than the pain of losing a brother in arms, a best friend, one of the most loyal individuals she’d ever had the pleasure of serving beside. 

What about drell heaven? What about the sea and the shore beyond?

She pushes that thought from her mind as well. It was one thing to think about someone who still had time to question the nature of the afterlife. It was another thing entirely to think about someone who had, in the raw and recent past, found himself with the answers. 

Shepard decides that she doesn’t need her afterlife to be a specific place. Some afterlives were described as being tailored to the soul's desires, and her desire now is for rest. She’s pretty content with the idea of death being just what she’s experiencing now: Silence. Darkness. The sensation that she is slowly falling asleep, infinitely and forever. 

She won’t feel the impact when she lands on the jagged rubble left in the wake of the conduit’s blast. She won’t feel it when fragments of rock and glass and metal begin to rain down onto her face, her arms, her legs. There is barely any feeling left to be had at the edge of life, but a warm, wet heat begins to spread in her chest and Shepard knows this is it. For all the abuse she’s weathered, this is finally more than she can take. It won’t be long now. 

As Thane’s voice comes to her one last time, echoing back through memory, Shepard begins to wonder if her entire life will flash before her eyes, or if she’ll only be treated to the highlights of these last few wretched months. 

_“It was a good fight."_

“A great fight,” she wants to whisper back into the rubble that surrounds her, but she’s forgotten how to speak. The warmth in her chest is spreading. 

_“Then go and finish it. And when you go to the sea, I will be waiting for you at the shore.”_  

* * * 

Against all her might, she’s emerging from that coveted state of uninterrupted rest and static, waking from a dream she'd been content to live forever.

When the feeling comes back into Shepard’s extremities, she can feel every ridge and partition of the N7 armor that juts into her arms and the bottom of her thighs where the sections come together. She can feel the way the sniper rifle on her back jams into the spot between her shoulder blades. 

Opening her eyes, she finds herself crouched behind a storage container, shielding herself from the roaming Eclipse mercenaries that fire a constant volley of bullets over her head. The slide of the Phalanx is locked open, and Shepard reaches for a spare clip to find her reserves depleted. Nothing for the Mattock, either, and the very fact that she'd let something like this happen catches her off-guard.

“Shepard!” 

In the moment or two that Shepard's scrambling for an extra magazine and mentally cussing herself out for making such a beginner's mistake, a terse half-whisper catches her attention. She casts a quick glance across the open, vulnerable pathway that cuts through the center of the room to see Garrus and Tali crouched behind another large crate with their weapons at the ready. Garrus holds a spare magazine in his hand, and once he’s locked eyes with Shepard to make his intent clear, he waits for the barrage of gunfire to cease. Taking a quick peek around the edge of cover, he makes sure the mercenaries are far too preoccupied with reloading to notice what he’s about to do. 

He tosses the clip to Shepard and she catches it silently, slapping it into her gun just in time to be deafened by another burst of enemy fire. It lasts for a few more earsplitting moments, and then the telltale sound of empty magazines dropping to the ground signals their chance to end the fight. When Shepard rolls forward into a crouched firing stance, peeking out from behind cover to solidly lodge the last of Garrus’s ammunition into the torsos of the remaining Eclipse mercenaries, her team follows suit until she hears him call out a sharp, “All clear.” 

The trio straightens to their feet, and Shepard locks eyes with Garrus for a moment, offering him a silent nod of thanks which he returns in earnest. There is a fleeting chance for some good-natured ribbing—comments about her being trigger-happy met with jabs about how after pulling his ass out of the fire so many times, tossing her some extra ammo was the least he could do—but neither of them say anything. His head’s in the fight, but what’s left of his heart is still on Omega. She can see the ghosts in his eyes; now is not the time for jokes.

On top of everything else, Shepard herself was still relatively "new" to him. Following Garrus's rescue from Omega and eventual release from med-bay, she'd taken him aside and tried to provide some personal context for the whole thing. She could handle seeing skepticism in the eyes of everyone else—and knew that, as she built her team, there was only more to come—but hoped she could at least clear herself with him. He'd listened, asking the right questions at the right time, but there hadn't been much else. He'd said he believed her—still trusted her, even. But between the time they'd lost and everything that had happened in those two years, there was still a sizable gap to close between the two of them.

The nature of their mission might be like old times, but in many ways, it's too soon for them to be as they were, and Shepard knows this. 

She heads for the closest dead mercenary and begins rifling through his pockets. “Scanner?”

“Clear for now,” Garrus reports. 

“Won’t be that way for long,” Shepard mutters, the rigidity of her voice mirroring the tense yet precise rhythm of her motions as she makes her way around the room, rearming and stashing the rest as her squad follows suit. “We need to keep moving.” 

Stuffing a few more clips into the front pocket of her armor, Shepard hears booted footsteps thudding somewhere in the immediate distance. Raising the Mattock, she leads her team through a room which is exceptionally nondescript. It is a place which might have blended together with all the other dreary, near-monochrome locations she’d fought her way through in the last few years, but even before she’s made it to the next doorway she’s pinpointed where she is, which memory she’s reliving.

She’s in the Dantius Towers, chasing after Thane Krios. Racing against “the assassin.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did a tiny bit of post-publishing editing here on December 9 (the day after I posted) and removed the bit about Shepard's memories being misrepresented. I had plans for an arc which have since fallen through in writing later chapters, but I promise there's still plenty of fluff and sap to come. (I also promise this will be the only time doing major edits after posting! I'm not used to publishing something before it's all done. Whoops.) Thank you so much for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

The one thing Shepard still hasn’t gotten used to since her resurrection is how easily she could generate varying levels of panic just by walking into a room. Oftentimes the shock and fear were followed by distrust—or worse, accusations—and it made wrapping her own head around the ordeal even more difficult. Truth be told, it could have been—and, indeed, had been—a lot worse. Distasteful though it was, it was comparatively easy to walk through a store on the Citadel and be subjected to the reactions of strangers: the whispers, the gasps, the motions of fingers pointing and hands flying to mouths. The reactions of those impersonal masses who looked upon her and saw a ghost.

The flip side of this coin was comprised of scenarios where those she met tried to ignore the fact that she'd been legally dead for two years and literally dead for only slightly less time. They refused to meet her gaze, tried to ignore the elephant in the room, tried to pretend like nothing had happened.

To this day, Shepard can’t make up her mind which she hated more.

Even Garrus’s reaction to her return had been lackluster at best, and that in and of itself had been a hard blow. By no means did Shepard blame him for not greeting her with fanfare. He’d been exhausted, paranoid, brushing shoulders with death at least once every couple of hours for who knew how many consecutive, stimpack-powered days on Omega. Not to mention the horrors he must have endured before she’d found him there holed up in that makeshift crow’s nest. The ghosts were in his eyes; she could see them as soon as she’d gotten within arm’s reach, despite the fact that it would be days if not weeks before he’d admit the nature of those ghosts. But whereas everyone else had looked at her with fear in their eyes, Garrus had looked at her like she’d never even left, and not in a way that betrayed any sort of sentimentality. Shepard would never admit to the effect this had on her, realizing fully well there were bigger things going on, but his reaction had stung more than a little. He was her best friend, her one touchstone in a fucked up, power-hungry world that had learned to grant and reverse death as they saw fit, and his apparent indifference had stung.

Several days of failed attempts at small talk ended in another solid week of them dodging each other in the mess and only seeing each other on missions. Awkward situation or not, there was still no one Shepard trusted more than him to have her back. Eventually, Garrus couldn’t stand it anymore. Though the unease was mutual, he knew Shepard wasn’t going to force him, and he asked her to the battery to talk. She’d agreed, but he almost wished she hadn’t. The way she’d stood there, carefully keeping both sentiment and sadness from her face but unable to keep it from her eyes, had made his task all the harder. He’d spent the better part of a full minute gesturing more than actually talking, forming half strings of sentences and incoherent sounds, each a failed attempt at beginning the conversation how he wanted. Eventually, he’d turned his back to her, his hands coming to rest on the calibration screen, but his fingers didn’t move.

It would be easier to explain if he didn’t have to see her face.

A lot had happened since Shepard had died, and Garrus was barely sleeping even when he was doing everything he could to keep memories of what had happened with Sidonis at bay. Fully explaining why he hadn’t reacted to seeing Shepard again required explaining why he’d even been on Omega in the first place, how he’d become Archangel, and he knew it would bring those issues to the surface in full force. The entirety of it wasn’t something Shepard needed to hear. Not right then, anyways. Not with everything being as fresh as it was. But at the same time, she had to know that he didn't distrust her simply because she'd shown up again with two Cerberus employees by her side. She had to believe that this all went much, much deeper than she knew.

The succinct truth of it, Garrus had explained, tapping away at the control panel and pointedly trying to ignore Shepard’s gaze on the back of his head, was that he hadn’t even been sure it was her rescuing him. He’d never even heard of Jacob or Miranda prior to their meeting on Omega, so he’d been fairly certain they weren’t hallucinations. But Shepard’s arrival had coincided with his using the last of the stimpacks and loading the last of his ammunition, and he’d figured that if he was about to die, Shepard might just be the last thing he'd "see" anyways. They hadn’t talked much for a few days after that. Even now, Shepard wonders if he regrets admitting something so personal and what it had cost him to do so.

Concerning reactions to Shepard’s resurrection, some were incredulous. Some were pointedly, desperately trying to appear indifferent.

In the case of Nassana Dantius, there is only fear.

* * *

“Shepard? But…you’re dead.”

Shepard says nothing, standing there with her weapon drawn but lowered, watching the cutthroat asari take a step back in alarm.

“And now you’re here to kill me,” Nassana accuses. As she speaks, Shepard can see the guards on either side of her raise their guns a bit higher to level with her head.

There's not much to be said in response to this claim. Nassana is neither entirely right nor entirely wrong. Shepard’s here for the assassin, not for her, but when the drell arrives, Shepard certainly won’t try to stop him from pulling the trigger.

The vents above are rattling ever so slightly. To Shepard’s left, Garrus has cocked his head ever so slightly toward the sound. To her right, Tali has begun casting nervous glances upward and over her shoulder.

“I’m sure you find this all very ironic,” Nassana goes on, pacing back and forth as the edge in her voice grows harder. “First you take care of my sister, and now you’re here for me.”

“I’m not here for you, Nassana.” Shepard finally breaks her silence.

“Well, then what the hell _are_ you here for?” Nassana snaps, visibly agitated now as her pace back and forth quickens. Beside her, the asari commando has heard the noise from the vents, and is peering upwards in confusion. “Is it credits? Is that what you want? Just tell me your—”

There is another creak from the vents above, louder this time, jarring enough to startle Nassana into the briefest silence before she goes on. “Just tell me your price. We can make this problem go away— _what?_ ” she snaps at the commando, who is now pointing her gun directly at the ceiling.

“I heard something.”

“So check the other entrances,” Nassana snaps, her gaze still solidly fixed on Shepard. “Did you bring a team?” she asks, as if expecting an answer.

From where Shepard stands, she can see the only topside entry into the room: a small, circular vent that slightly protrudes from the ceiling halfway between where Nassana stands and the edge of the penthouse office. Shepard’s eyes might be playing tricks on her in the dim, sunset-colored lighting of the room, but she could swear she saw the very bottom edge of a coattail inside the vent.

Shepard fights every urge she has to take an alarmed step back. She can't risk alerting Nassana.

The lithe, wiry frame drops from the ceiling, landing with a catlike silence that alerts neither Nassana nor her guards even as he takes a moment to regain his balance. Rising from a crouch, the assassin lunges for the first guard, splaying one hand over the man’s face and planting the other at the base of his skull, quickly snapping his neck with a sickening crunch that startles the others. They may be aware of this new threat, but it is already too late. Before the first man has even hit the ground, Thane is in motion once again, landing a solid punch to the throat of the next guard and dropping him instantly before the latter even has a chance to reach for his weapon. The returning commando is the only one quick enough to pull her gun, but the assassin has already drawn his, leveling the pistol with her chest and firing a round that permanently disrupts her shields with a brief, bright flash. The round has lodged itself in her heart before she even has a chance to cry out.

Thane whirls around to find Nassana raising her pistol, but she is not quick enough on the draw. He deflects the shot, brusquely knocking her arm aside and clamping his fingers down on her wrist as he does so, burying the muzzle of his own weapon into her abdomen with a force that makes her fold. He does not fire immediately, and it is an odd, surreal moment in which Nassana seems briefly paralyzed by shock. She knows this is the end of the line; Shepard can see it in her face and Thane can feel it in her lack of struggle. She looks down to the gun pressed against her stomach, but she never gets the chance to look into the eyes of the man that is about to take her life.

When Thane fires his weapon, Nassana doubles over, and he catches her. In one fluid motion, he reholsters his gun and brings his right hand to rest at the back of her head, his arm looping around her waist. Slowly, he lets her body fall back onto the table, handling her with an apparent respect that Shepard had not expected to find in an assassin. Nassana’s groans are choked, agonized things, but Thane pays them no mind. He folds her arms over the wound, letting her pass in silence. When the last shallow breath leaves her lungs, Thane bows his head, bringing his hands together and closing his eyes.

“Impressive.” There is a forced cockiness to Garrus’s voice, and Shepard can hear the fear rumbling low in his subharmonics. She can tell by the terse manner of his speech, no matter how casual he attempts to sound, that he’s itching to reach for his sidearm. He’s uneasy. Contracted killer or no, this man had just ruthlessly taken down three guards—including an asari commando—on his way to the target, and the whole thing had taken less than ten seconds. That alone made him tantamount to a lion free of its cage. “You certainly know how to make an entrance.”

Despite the challenging nature of Garrus’s words, Thane remains silent. From either side, Shepard hears her team arming themselves. She casts a quick glance to her left where Garrus has brought the sniper rifle up, and she sees him rolling his weight forward as if readying to take the impact of recoil. To her right, Tali has brought her pistol up and clutches it nervously. Her fingers are twitching around the trigger guard in her own display of nervousness. The sound of Shepard’s team drawing their weapons is not at all subtle, and Shepard knows the assassin has heard every bit of it, but he pays them no mind. He neither responds nor moves, standing over Nassana’s body with his hands still folded together, eyes still closed in something paralleling—but not quite matching—reverence.

Whatever kind of assassin Shepard thought she was going to find in Thane Krios, this wasn’t it.

There were variations on the soldier’s mindset, and Shepard had crossed paths with many of them over the years. Killing marked everyone in its own way, and everyone had formed a different relationship with the idea and the respective reasons for it. Some, like Shepard, viewed it as the absolute final resource, the road taken only when all others were unavailable. For some, the act was enough to break them, to drive them into requesting transfers or bouts of self-medication which lead to other terrible roads entirely. And then there were those select few for whom killing became a dark fascination of its own, an action that never quite prompted the horrified response that Shepard had experienced the first handful of times she'd taken a life. But finding someone who appeared to be both without conscience in his methods and—dare she say it—spiritual in the aftermath? That was an entirely different phenomenon altogether.

Raising a low hand to signal for Garrus and Tali to stay where they are, Shepard takes a few tentative steps forward.

“Krios?” she asks, and she wishes her voice sounded more authoritative—and less bewildered—than it does. “I was hoping to talk to you.”

“I apologize,” Thane responds, and his voice is a distorted harmony, glassy ocean waves crashing against the jagged edge of a cliff. “Prayers for the wicked must not be forsaken.”

The only thought in Shepard’s head at that moment is one of incredulity. Nassana had not, in Shepard’s low regard of her, been anyone deserving of prayer or redemption. Her sins had not been ones committed for the sake of survival, but for the sake of ruthless ideals, and in Shepard’s mind, Nassana was someone barely worth remembering. Yet there’s something about the single-mindedness with which the assassin is praying that makes Shepard hold her tongue.

It is the lack of questioning or rebuttal that prompts Thane to raise his eyes to meet hers. He finds her standing there, flanked on either side by a team with their weapons raised, but her weapons are holstered and her hands are by her side. Not even crossed in defiance or defense, simply hanging there as she watches him, her brows furrowed in something more than confusion. It's almost akin to fascination. He seems to read the question in her eyes, and answers what he can.

“Not for her. For me.”

That much, at least, Shepard can understand. Within this context, praying for oneself was far more understandable than praying for the soul of another. But then again, whether he was simply fulfilling a contract or also responding to a higher moral calling at the same time remained to be seen.

“Do you think she was worth praying for?” Shepard asks, nodding down at Nassana’s body.

Thane straightens up to face her and folds his hands behind his back. His stance is instantly transformed from once of penitence to once of confidence that borders on the defiant, and he meets Shepard’s gaze with an unwavering strength.

“It can be hard to condense someone’s life and virtues into a single dossier,” he says, and whether or not he knows how Shepard found him, the irony of the statement does not go unnoticed by her. “The good deeds of someone’s life can often be buried in the evils they turn to. What you were can become overshadowed by what you are.” He strolls out from behind the table and makes his way to the center of the room, seemingly unperturbed that the barrel of Garrus’s rifle is within inches of his unarmored body. “However,” he goes on, “if I didn’t think she was putting more evil into the world than good, I never would have taken this job. It was to be my last, but your presence here suggests you have other plans.”

“My sources tell me you’re freelance.”

“Your sources do not steer you wrong,” he says. “Across the sea, I will have my masters, but for this life, I am my own.”

“Let’s cut to the chase,” Shepard says, filing his comment away for later. “You’ve heard of the human colonies that are vanishing?”

“I’ve heard rumors of the worst.”

“The rumors are true. Freedom’s Progress was the most recent; the Collectors are going through and harvesting anyone they can get a hold of. I'm putting together a team to launch an assault on their home base. You'd be a vital asset."

“I see." His voice rumbles low in his throat, and Shepard cannot yet decipher the drell's subharmonic differences between offense and meditation. "Am I the first you’ve recruited, Shepard?”

She feels disconcerted; she never told him her name. Yet with the way news traveled across the Citadel, and her current reputation and record, it should hardly surprise her that he knows who she is. Maybe a dossier or two about her had come across his desk at some point the same way his had come across hers.

“Not exactly,” Shepard admits.

“How many have pledged themselves to this fight, Shepard?”

“A few have joined up.”

“So you’ve been successful in your recruitment attempts.”

“They’re good people willing to fight."

“You realize what you’re asking of them,” Thane says, turning to face Shepard and fixing her with a piercing stare. “You’re asking them to pass through a relay from which no ship has ever returned.”

“They told me it was impossible to get to Ilos, too, and we got back home from that."

"Hrm." He turns once more and goes over to the full-length windows that look out on the rest of Illium, and Shepard follows him, watching him closely.

“You do indeed seem to make it a habit of performing the impossible,” Thane grants her, still looking out at the city as he speaks. “I would hope your track record remains immaculate for the sake of those your crew would leave behind should the worst come to pass.” While his words are confrontational, there is no defiance in his tone. “Regardless, the risks are of no concern to me.”

“Are you not concerned about the risks for the same reason this was supposed to be your last job?” Shepard asks, and it is the first time in the conversation that he finds himself taken aback.

He speaks his answer to the window. “I’m dying.”

The answer is blunt, distinctly without emotion, and Shepard is taken aback by the stoicism of the reveal. “Are you sick?”

"It is not a communicable illness,” Thane responds, “and given the time frame of the mission, it is not likely to affect my work. I know you are looking to have the best at your side. If these conditions are agreeable to you, you may count me among your assets.”

“We’ve got one of the most prestigious medical bays, and our doctor is one of the best in the fleet. A bit gruff, but only if you don’t listen to her. Go check in with her once we dock. And consider yourself hired.”

It may be a trick of the light, but she could swear she saw him subdue a tiny smile.

“Very well, Shepard. Thank you for the opportunity.”

He extends a hand to her and she takes it in her own, sealing the deal with a firm shake, and she notices how, even in the wake of assassinating a room of people, and admitting his death with the kind of cadence as if he’d been talking about the weather, the hand in hers is completely steady.

“Welcome aboard.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, fun fact: I watched that fight at quarter speed roughly fifteen times before I was satisfied with how its written equivalent turned out. (Five of them were just because said fight looks really cool in slow motion.) I needed to pull a bit more from the canonical conversations of early, early Shrios to lay the groundwork for more "original" things to come later, but there is a lot of original fluff on the way. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this chapter. 
> 
> (Also, I did a teeny tiny bit of editing in Chapter 1 to remove the subplot of Shepard's memories being misrepresented. As I said there, it was going to be part of a larger arc, but I'm a few chapters in and realizing it's not going to be necessary for the feels.)
> 
> A huge thank you to everyone reading, commenting, or leaving kudos!


	3. Chapter 3

Shepard’s lost count of how many times she’s reheated the cup of coffee that sits adjacent to the small mountain of datapads that have accumulated on the mess hall table, altogether forgetting the drink’s existence more than a few times as she became immersed in the vast amounts of raw data surrounding the Freedom’s Progress abduction. 

There are breakdowns of every possible statistic related to the incident, endless combinations threaded together in an attempt to figure out what it was about the planet that had made it a primary target. Everything from an examination of its demographic, to its placement within the Terminus system, to the planet's natural resources, had been called into question at one point or another, and her eyes have begun to ache, along with her head, but there is a kind of urgent fascination to be had with the whole endeavor. She’d never been much for analyzing data, preferring to snipe and strategize her way to resolutions. Yet when faced with a situation when the very nature of the problem itself had to be deciphered before a solution could be planned, Shepard would often find herself with a nagging discomfort at her own lack of action.

Attempting to form a pattern from the abstract data is a task for which Shepard is ill-equipped, but there’s not much to be done. Even Hackett’s private channel to her had been silent for over a week, and with no classic battles to fight, such attempts at analysis are the only things Shepard can contribute to the cause. She loads another article, ignoring the throbbing headache that pulses behind her eyes.

Coming to the end of the eighth article, Shepard lets the datapad clatter somewhat unceremoniously onto the mess hall table and jams the heels of her palms into her eyes, resting for a moment and enjoying the lack of blaring gold-orange screens. The moment is over too quickly as the guilt sets in, and she lets her hands drop. With a snappy blink or two, Shepard pushes back from the table and retrieves the cup of coffee to reheat it once more, trying to stretch out the painful kink that runs through her shoulder and neck as she goes.

Drink freshly warmed for the fifth time that day, Shepard takes a sip of the first decent coffee she’s had in days, and, for once, she lets herself enjoy it. Though Gardner would constantly deny it, Shepard’s pretty sure he’s been brewing an extra pot or two of the good stuff for her.

Fever dreams of floating above Alchera had driven Shepard down to the mess a few nights prior and, in her desire to think about anything else, she’d wound up reading about armaments and upgrades for the Normandy for the better part of four hours. Gardner had also wandered down at one point and found her drinking the rank, oily dregs left over from the day. He hadn’t said much—indeed, no one really knew what to say to Shepard these days, knowing her as some kind of corporeal ghost at best—but he’d decided aloud that if she was to get any sort of decent research done, she’d need a refill. He’d brewed her something fresh, told her to get some sleep, and disappeared back to his quarters. Since then, there had been fresh coffee for all the sleepless nights of research, and indeed there had been several.

“How many times is that, Commander?”

The distorted harmony of an unmistakable voice fills the empty mess hall, and Shepard turns to find Thane standing there at the perimeter of the room, arms behind his back. His stance is formal but his voice is less so, though not altogether skillfully. For all his versatility with the more eloquent aspects of speech, Shepard could swear he’d fallen out of practice with small talk.

“Oh, five or six,” Shepard responds with a forced half smile. “I plan on breaking double digits before I actually get around to drinking the rest of it.”

Thane attempts to mirror her expression, but the outcome is half-baked at best. “I came to ask if you had a moment,” he says. “However, I see you’re busy, and I don’t wish to interrupt.”

“Please, interrupt,” Shepard responds. “Only so many times I can read the same sentence without understanding it before I realize I should probably take a break.”

Retrieving her coffee, Shepard takes the now-steaming mug over to the table and gestures for Thane to join her. She attempts to make a space for him, scooping the datapads from their haphazard, leisurely sprawl across the table and bringing them across to her side.

“So, what’s on your mind?”

“May I inquire as to what you’re doing?” Thane asks, taking the seat opposite her, and his eyes roam the table.

“Research,” Shepard says tiredly. “That’s the short version.”

“And the long version?”

“Attempting to figure out if there’s any sort of reason Freedom’s Progress was singled out,” she tells him. “Population density and demographics, natural resources, that sort of thing. Investigating and cleaning up the mess afterwards is one thing, but I’ve got…entirely too much downtime right now. Wanted to see if anybody had a lead on potential future attacks based on the statistics of this one, to see if we could intercept it and get the colonists out of there beforehand.”

"An interesting endeavor," Thane muses, leaning forward and folding his hands on the cold metal. "It would seem your human colonies may have an angel of sorts watching out for them.”

Shepard does not, and cannot possibly, understand the gravity of his choice of words, so she merely brushes them off and shrugs. “Only if there’s an actual pattern to be had. If there’s not…sometimes the only thing you can do is avenge someone, but you always wish there’s something more to be done.”

It is now Shepard’s turn to unintentionally catch him off-guard, but Thane does not let her words ripple the veneer of his composure.

“You seem to have a good crew here. I trust they will do their best.”

“I just hope it amounts to enough,” Shepard mutters, and there is a myriad of emotion to be unpacked within the single, quiet sentence. As she admits her fear, she suddenly looks less official and more…well…human. It is a stance of vulnerability that Thane had not expected to find in a commander, much less one with a reputation like Shepard’s.

“I’m curious as to how many members of your crew understand the odds of this mission.”

“You’re asking how many of them know their chances of survival are supposedly slim to none?”

“Indeed. I imagine my own personal reasons for not being concerned do not extend to the majority of your crew,” Thane admits. “My reasons are…unique.”

“I pitched it to them the same way I pitched it to you. They know what they’re up against. At least, as far as the odds go.”

“A noble undertaking.”

“If we take the hit now, many people might not have to later," Shepard shrugs, but the nonchalance of her expression does not reach her eyes. There is a suppressed flicker of fear there that Thane picks up on immediately but does not question.

“You’ve amassed a decent following,” he observes. “They must have better faith in the odds if so many have professed themselves as willing.”

“Unfortunately, not all of them are openly willing,” Shepard tells him. “It’s ugly, but it’s true. You’re here of your own will, same as Garrus and Tali and the others, but most of the crew was assigned to the ship before the whole situation turned into a ticking time bomb. I’m sure some of them could request transfers, but a lot of them wouldn’t have those requests granted. Best we can hope for for them is that the odds of survival wind up being a lot higher than we all think.”

“A comment, if I might?”

“Go ahead.”

“Death doesn’t seem to mean much to you.”

“Should I be flattered or offended?” Shepard asks him with half a smile to soften the edge of her words.

Thane shakes his head, indicating he means neither. “It’s an interesting turn of fate that the one person who finds herself brought back from the dead should be assigned to a mission where death is, seemingly, the only possible outcome.”

“So you know about that, huh?”

“It wasn’t exactly a secret,” Thane says. “The first human Spectre resurrected by a possible terrorist group garnered more than a bit of coverage. News travels fast and even faster for those with access to the proper channels.”

Shepard knows he’s alluding to the vids, and it makes her guts turn. She knows what the vids portray of her, the warped perspective they spew day and night. Even before her resurrection, the news outlets had capitalized on her lost team at Akuze every chance they got, making her then-current struggles out to be more of a repeated past than anything. They had drawn parallels, using Ashley and Kirrahe’s deaths as a watered down “sole survivor” narrative. They wove false tales of love into the stories of her fights against Saren and Sovereign, as if Shepard couldn’t just be fighting for what was right; no, no, she had to be fighting for a lover. The fact that Kaidan had survived Virmire had simultaneously been the first and final nail in that fictionalized coffin: While nobody but Shepard and the core crew of the SR-1 had known about the unavoidable choice Shepard had had to make, the newscasters told their lies and told them well, spinning tales of a starry-eyed choice and the reason behind it, and the narrative spread like wildfire. It was easier for the public to grasp the idea of love and loss than it was a possible, ancient threat rising up once more. It gave them something else to think about. It kept them quiet.

“Though…if it eases your embarrassment, Commander,” Thane adds, “I learned all I had to know by other means.”

That catches Shepard off-guard, and she doesn’t care to admit the enormity of the relief she feels. She lets one raised eyebrow stand in lieu of any overt line of questioning.

“You came across my desk the same way I came across yours. As I said, news travels fast.”

“Not the vids?”

“I will admit, I saw a few of the earliest ones,” Thane says. “I didn’t indulge them for long. Memories made ought to have some meaning, and I had no use for their narrative. Your dossier told me what I needed to know, without the embellishments that give the grieving masses something to focus on.”

“Shame,” Shepard says.

“How so?”

“I was hoping you maybe hadn’t been given the kind of gritty details I can only imagine are in there.”

“And why is that?”

“Because so far, you were the only one that didn’t have an explicit reason to distrust me.” Shepard says with more than just a little virulence. “Pretty much everyone on this mission, whether they’re altruistic or not, willingly signed on or not, either aligns me with an organization that’s somehow ruined their lives, or they knew me before the SR-1 went down and don’t trust that what Cerberus brought back is still me. Forget the vids. They know the vids are bullshit. But that still doesn’t clear me of their distrust or their suspicion.”

“I cannot speak for the rest of the crew, Shepard,” Thane begins, and beneath the natural dissonance, Shepard catches a distinct note of kindness within his voice. “But I am here because you are, essentially, on a mission to remove evil from the world. That aligns with the Shepard who took down Saren, the Shepard who existed before Cerberus got involved. I doubt that, if there was something fundamentally different in you now, your motives would still be what they are. And if I suspected you were doing all this for personal gain, I would not have signed on.”

“I feel like that means a lot, coming from you,” Shepard says. “You don’t seem the type that throws around his loyalty.”

“Indeed, I am not,” Thane responds, and somewhere in the back of her mind Shepard wonders if she is right, and he is taking a risk on trusting her, or if she is right, and he has—despite signing on—not yet trusted her with his loyalty. She doesn't have much time to root through the subtext, because at that moment her earpiece squelches, and Joker’s on the other end.

“Commander?”

“Go ahead, Joker.”

“Hackett just radioed in. Says he left a private message for you at the terminal. I’m not really sure how urgent it is, but I _will_ say he sounded a little uptight.” A pause, then, “More uptight than normal.”

“That all?”

“That’s all, Commander.”

“Thanks. Radio if you need anything.”

“Alright, then. Joker out.”

The line goes silent once more.

“You have matters to attend to,” Thane comments as Shepard reaches for her omni-tool.

“Seems that way,” she replies. “Never a dull moment.”

With a few light taps, Shepard pulls up her inbox, and the bold-texted subject line of the newest message there makes her blood run cold.

**SSV Normandy.**

Tapping on the message and scrolling through, Shepard manages to compartmentalize most of the abject panic that bubbles up just at the mere mention of the Amada system, but halfway through the email, the room takes a sickening lurch to one side.

“ _…place the monument…_ ”

“ _…first to walk on the site…_ ”

Twenty crew members unaccounted for. Twenty families still looking for even a shred of closure.

Shepard has never hated the idea of something more than she does now, and the mere idea of getting close to Alchera is enough to make her throat tighten up— _no, stop it, Shepard, you’re fine, you’re breathing_ —but she can’t say no.

“Shepard?”

“I have to go,” Shepard blurts out, sending the chair skidding backwards as she rises from her seat and rips the omni-tool from her arm, letting it drop to the table. The blood pounds behind her eyes and her arms are going heavy. She fights it as best she can, but she can already feel herself slipping closer and closer to the edge and over into panic.

Shepard would hate reacting this way in front of anyone, but the idea of reacting this way in front of her newer, less-familiar crew, was beyond unacceptable to her. The crew of the original Normandy had been the closest thing Shepard had found to family all the way out here, and their mutual experiences with the kind of horror that went above and beyond what any other ship in the fleet might consider “normal” had formed a close bond between those who had survived its demise. Joker had seen her angry. Garrus, too, on multiple occasions. Getting overwhelmed in front of Chakwas was like getting overwhelmed in front of a loving aunt. But Thane was different altogether. He had not gone through the same kind of hell with them, was nowhere near being a tested and true member of the ship. He’d been nothing but stoic since his arrival, exhibiting a clinical detachment from the whole matter to the point where it made even Shepard somewhat uneasy, albeit in a way that spoke more of curiosity than fear. She had every reason to believe that he didn’t fully trust her yet, hadn’t fully put stock into her as a person despite signing on to her cause, and this reaction, she knows, is the last thing he should be seeing.

Her movements are clumsy and sluggish as she tries to gather the datapads, and Thane is only vaguely familiar with the wide variety of human stress responses, but the suddenly far-off look in her eyes, coupled with the way her movements aren’t entirely coordinated, tells him she might be on the verge of dissociation.

“Shepard,” he says again, sharper this time, and the jagged edge of his subharmonics brings her gaze to his. For a moment, her eyes are no longer empty. “What’s happened?”

“Mission from the Admiral,” she says, and every word costs her. She’s trying very, very hard not to just slump down in her chair again, both for the message it would send and for the way her legs might quit on her if she does.

“Do you require backup?” His voice is calmer now, but there is still a firmness to the way he speaks, as if perceiving her distress and yet challenging her to remain resilient. Shepard notes, with mild appreciation, how he does not poke and prod into the nature of the mission, how he only asks if she needs his help and nothing more.

“No,” she says, breaking eye contact and leaning over the table once again. “It’ll be quick. More of a…sentimental mission than anything else.”

“You won’t be needing me?”

“No. Stay here. Stay on deck in case something…” Shepard swallows hard, picks her next word to try and sound casual though she hates herself for doing it. “In case something important comes up.”

“Very well.”

“I have to go.”

She’s gathered roughly the first half of the stack, clutching them to her chest with a kind of desperate force and hoping she can make it back to her cabin without littering the ship with broken glass and circuitry along the way. Before she can solve the logistical issue of carrying in one trip what had taken her five to acquire, Thane’s scooping up the remainder of the stack.

“You don’t have to—”

“You have matters to attend to, Shepard,” he repeats, more solemn than before. “It’s best if you are not kept waiting by trivialities.”

Their eyes meet again, and Shepard understands what lingers, unspoken.

_Let me help you._

She means to thank him but the word gets lost along the way, and she merely nods once before averting her gaze as they scoop up the last of the equipment and head for the elevator.

They don’t speak all the way to Shepard’s cabin. She lets them both in and makes a beeline for her desk, all but dropping the datapads before sitting down at the terminal and pulling up Hackett’s message again. She is oblivious to Thane's presence as he works beside her, tidying up the stacks which are about to slip off the desk and shatter on the floor. Under any other circumstance, this weird dismissal might even come across as a slight, but as he casts a covert glance to the side, he can immediately tell that Shepard is not seeing the screen in front of her. She is anywhere but in that tiny captain’s cabin.

Having finished, Thane straightens up and rests a hand on the back of her chair. “I won’t keep you, Shepard,” he says, barely loud enough for her to hear. Why he feels suddenly a bit demure in her presence, he has no idea. “You know where to find me.”

He is gone and out of the room with little more sound than the hiss of the door opening and shutting behind him, but Shepard hears none of it. Her eyes are still fixed on the screen, rereading Hackett’s message a third time and then a fourth.

Twenty crew members. Twenty families.

She wonders if anyone had looked for that kind of closure when it had been her.

Shepard taps the key on the terminal’s touchscreen a bit too hard, and the screen is still wobbling back and forth when Joker answers.

“Commander?”

“We need to make a stop at Alchera.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you all had a great Christmas/holiday season! Crafting entirely too many gifts (and seasonal prep in general) put me way behind the power curve in terms of writing and future chapter prep, but I'm hoping to get back to regular Saturday night uploads. As always, a huge thank you to everyone reading, commenting, and/or leaving kudos!


	4. Chapter 4

**2183 CE (Two Years Ago)**

Footage of the Citadel crumbling, intercut with surveillance footage of Sovereign, has been looping on the screen above the bar for the last two hours. Different shots. Different angles. Inserted interviews with witnesses, council officials, admirals, politicians. For the first half hour or so, everyone had watched, spellbound, and even in a back-alley bar crowded with vagabonds and outcasts, silence had fallen. Shepard hadn’t watched the vids. Hadn’t needed to. Garrus is right there with her, and he isn’t watching either. His armor still smells of cordite and his face is gaunt with fatigue as the two of them stare pointedly down into their drinks.

The rest of the galaxy had jumped into action responding to the threat, but in the wake of Shepard’s actions, there hadn’t been much to do unless you were a politician running damage control or a first response team clearing bodies from the rubble.

When Shepard had pulled herself free from the debris, Garrus and Kaidan had already been enveloped by the first responders with shock blankets being wrapped around their shoulders and oxygen masked fitted to their mouths. Yet for all the rote procedure of it, Garrus knew the interviewers would be on their way, and none of them—Shepard especially—felt like fielding questions that seemed to be pitched with a desired answer already baked in.

Deemed stable, Shepard, Garrus and Kaidan were temporarily left to their own devices, and the former two had snuck away the moment everyone’s back was turned. Still wrapped in the shock blankets which they’d ditched soon after, they'd gone looking to catch a shuttle to anywhere else. The Normandy itself was out of the question, as was anywhere within the immediate vicinity, and so they’d ended up in a bar on Omega. When the stunned silence of those watching the screen had slowly but surely returned to the kind of chatter that arises when people are trying to pretend the world is fine, it had been a welcome hum to them both.

Shepard looks over to Garrus, and her eyes trail up to the visor which even now he refuses to remove, to the lines carved into the bare metal of the frame. The line furthest to the right is newer than the others, less tarnished. Shepard had never asked him what the carvings stood for. She hadn’t needed to.

The night of Virmire, Shepard hadn’t dared to try and sleep, hadn’t wanted to be all alone with nothing but Ashley’s last words ringing in her head to keep her company. Wandering down to the cargo bay, she’d gone to see if the Mako needed any upkeep, just something rote to keep herself preoccupied. Hell, she would’ve happily taken just waxing the damn thing. But in lieu of an empty bay she'd found Garrus instead, sitting with his back against the door and his visor propped up on his knee. It was the first time she’d ever seen him with it off, and without the way it sharpened his whole demeanor, he’d looked so much younger. Shepard would never even think to call Garrus small, but seeing him there hunched over, so focused on the task in a way that seemed almost ritualistic, had been the first time Shepard had really begun to see the proverbial weight on Garrus’s shoulders. She began to realize the presence of untold stories that lurked behind his attitudes and his vehemence and his silences.

They hadn’t talked about it since, hadn’t even come close to touching the subject until now as Garrus breaks the silence with a forced attempt at sounding less shaken than he is.

“Had me a bit worried there, Shepard,” he comments, slowly rotating the glass of whiskey in his hands. “Thought I might’ve had to add you.” He doesn’t have to clarify his statement, but he taps the visor briefly all the same.

“No way, Vakarian,” Shepard responds with a falsely confident grin, sliding her tumbler across the table until it clinks against his. He offers little more than a noncommittal “hmm,” and Shepard finds herself staring at his visor once again until she is hit with a bit of solemn inspiration. She picks up her glass and downs the rest of its contents before speaking again.

“You still got that knife on you, Garrus?”

“Always keep it with me.”

“Mind if I borrow it?”

That catches Garrus’s full attention, and he looks over to see Shepard sitting there with a carefully blank expression on her face, though she does seem to be gripping her glass harder than before. He pulls the folding knife from one of the pouches snapped to his armor and passes it to her, watching her flick the blade open with one hand while she pulls her dog tags from around her neck with the other.

“Shepard?”

“For me,” she says, answering the unspoken portion of his question. Flipping over the tag that would never leave her, even in death, she begins to scratch one line into its back, and then another.

“One for the Citadel…” Shepard says as she runs the blade over the flat surface, carefully at first and then more aggressively as she deepens the carved trench. When it is done, she hesitates, as if wanting to give the knife back but knowing she can’t. “And,” she adds, bending over the tag once more, “one for Akuze. One for every time I shouldn’t have made it out and did.”

When the tags go back around her neck, the etches are not visible, and only two people know they are there.

* * *

**2185 CE** **(Present Day)**

Shepard takes the shuttle down alone, forcing herself to keep her eyes on the control panel and on her flight path instead of letting her eyes wander out to the debris field which is clearly and widely littered around the planet’s surface. 

Stepping out onto the planet’s surface, what stuns her even more than the cold is the silence. Most every other planet she’d found herself on was noisy, with vendors and officials and racketeers, with industry and thievery and treachery. But the loudest thing about Alchera is the wind, and even that is barely more than a low, ambient hiss. It is a silence unlike anything Shepard has heard before. Even in the tense silence of battle, there is the pounding of your own heart; the restricted, belabored breathing of those around you; the hiss of magazines being nervously changed. Even in most silences, there are things to be heard. But on Alchera, there is…nothing.

Her breath clouds in the atmosphere as she observes her surroundings, and for a moment, Shepard is reminded of the times she’d spent on Earth. Such times were always in December, always around the holidays when the world was quietest and the stars were clearest. Seeing a vast, unbroken canvas of them whenever she looked out the observation decks of whatever ship she happened to be on at the time was much different than how they looked back home. And when she was studying, training, trying to learn all she could, when the kind of terse fear of an ever-expanding world meant those stars were not surrounded by empty space but rather by new potential conflict, the once-magic of being among the stars became something to which Shepard was blind.

But something about those visits always put Shepard at ease. She didn’t much care for the customs or the music of the holidays themselves, and the daughter of Hannah Shepard certainly had not been shielded enough to think that one localized, Earth-bound celebration would be respected as a time of peace; logically, Shepard knew anything could happen at any time. But she was a creature of habit, and though she’d never admit it, for the handful of times she’d been there, Shepard’s feet felt more solid on Earth than anywhere else. She’d fallen into the habit of sneaking out at night, walking into the fields behind her aunt’s house, and, with the cold nipping at her face and the exposed parts of her neck, Shepard would look up and try to see something more than constant threat. She’d try to convince herself that the galaxy was indeed still as empty as she’d once thought it to be, that she was alone not only on the planet but in the grand, cosmic scope of things. Back then, the concept of such loneliness was comforting.

That very kind of quiet loneliness is what permeates Alchera now, but the loneliness does not feel safe, does not feel peaceful as it once did, and in that one moment, Shepard has never felt quite so desolate.

Forcing her thoughts to more pressing matters, Shepard makes her way forward. It’s easy to tell which storage crate is new, its charcoal exterior looking pristine against the snow. Popping the clamps, Shepard unearths the monument, and the cold metal of the structure stings her skin through the gloves, but for that pain she grips it all the harder. She walks with the monument until she finds the largest part of the ship still intact, the proud Normandy title still splayed on its hull. Pressing the base of the monument deep into the snow until it no longer wobbles, Shepard kneels before the memory of twenty people who had made the ultimate sacrifice without even being granted the dignity of fighting first.

* * *

Twenty sets of dog tags have gone into her bag, each with the pelline chain wrapped carefully around the tag itself. Shepard’s eyes ache as though she hadn’t slept in days, and whereas once her gait had been purposeful, since finding her old N7 helmet her steps had slowed. But she’d done what she’d come here to do, and in the morning each set of tags, along with a photo of the monument and a message from Hackett—a letter that Shepard knows will somehow be both too stiffly formal and yet too sugar-coated—will be sent to each respective family.

Realistically, Shepard knows that much of the death felt on this planet had actually occurred beforehand, that many of those lost had suffered burns, lacerations, concussions, a myriad of other trauma that would have had them, plunging, lifeless, onto the surface below. But even for her small actions, the place feels a little less haunted in the same way a graveyard, when its headstones have been polished and its flowers have been changed from something dead to something vibrant, can seem a little more at peace.

Shepard tightens her grip around the helmet and the bag of tags and quickens her pace back to the shuttle when she feels an unnatural crunch beneath her gait, something more rigid than the frozen snow snapping beneath her boots. Moving her foot, Shepard sees the unusual contrast of dark silver against the icy white of the snow. At first, she assumes it’s just another loose piece of debris, but curiosity has her crouching down all the same. Brushing away snow and dirt, Shepard turns the tag over to find her own name staring back at her, along with the rest of her identifying information. Flipping the first tag over, two carefully etched marks come into view. At first, it doesn’t register. Doesn’t make sense. Had the chain around her neck snapped between her landing the shuttle and now?

Setting down the helmet and the bag of tags, Shepard raises her gloved hand to her mouth and sinks her teeth into the fabric, ripping her hand out of the glove and ignoring the cold that instantaneously begins to bite at her skin. Reaching down her own armor, Shepard feels around for a chain, expecting to find nothing but bare skin to confirm her own suspicions. But her fingers latch onto a chain and pull forth the tags she’d woken up wearing in the Cerberus med-bay. The ones Miranda had later told her had been recovered from the crash site. She flips them over. There are no gashes.

These aren’t her tags.

The metaphor is painfully on the nose. It’s stupid. It shouldn’t matter. There is more to who Shepard is, what she’s done and what she stands for, than two little gashes. But as she sits alone on the debris-littered graveyard that is Alchera, it doesn’t seem that way, and she is glad that no one is there to see how long she crouches there in the snow, clutching dog tags that belong to who she was before.

When she manages to roust herself, the return trip to the SR2 takes half the time. She's in no mood to linger. Garrus is waiting for her in the cargo bay—of course, under the guise of wanting to make sure the new shuttle was performing adequately, coupled with some jab about not trusting Cerberus equipment. Jokes aside, Shepard knows he's down there to check on her, to check for that blank canvas look in her eyes which meant she either needed to spar, drink, or rant. Before she'd even opened the door of the shuttle, she had driven that look from her face.

Garrus already hadn't been sure it was really her he was seeing on Omega.

_He doesn't need to know that he might be right,_ Shepard thinks as she heads to the cockpit to advise Joker of their current flight path, and then up to her cabin to scald away the endless, deathly cold of Alchera. 

* * *

Shepard would like to think that there’s no particular reason why she’s sitting in the mess in the near-dark, with only the dim emergency floor lights to light the room.

She could lie to herself and say that it’s because her cabin is too quiet, too cold, too close; that, from here, she doesn't have to look at the skylight of stars passing by; that, down here, the ship hums almost as if alive, a sound which is better than any mother’s voice when it came to soothing and luring her to sleep.

She could be truthful with herself and say it’s because she doesn’t know how to process what’s happened, how she never did have much of an idea how to respond to things of this nature. She knew to fight in a battlefield and knew to weep before a grave, but when it came to the gray areas where the stimulus could be taken as one of either insignificant or gargantuan proportions, depending on how she looked at it, Shepard never really knew which route to take.

And then there's the issue of impressions already made. The way Shepard had departed the mess earlier, all distracted and falling over herself, has not been sitting well with her. Despite the embarrassment, there’s a part of her that wishes for the one person who, beyond a handful of pages, does not yet have any litmus by which to measure her, the one individual with whom she is on fresh, unmarked ground.

Someone who, she suspects, knows what to do with the gray areas.

The telltale hiss of doors opening prompts Shepard to question whether her luck really is that good or bad, depending on how she looked at it, but before she can take the time to decide, Thane is stepping around the corner and into the mess once again in a dimly-lit parody of earlier that day.

“Thane,” she says, and her voice, if only temporarily, betrays the relief she feels at seeing him.

“Shepard,” he returns, with a respectful nod of his head.

“You can’t sleep either, huh?”

“No, indeed. It's been a while since sleep came to me easily."

“What’s keeping you up?” Shepard asks.

“Memories,” Thane smiles thinly. “And yourself?”

“Could say the same.” Shepard speaks to the dog tags, her gaze having shifted back down, and she hears Thane’s quiet footsteps approaching.

“I’m…not entirely sure, Shepard, if what I’m about to say is appropriate.”

“It’s way too late for all that,” Shepard says. “We can be formal in the morning. What’s up?”

“I heard details from the others concerning the mission you undertook today,” he says, taking another tentative step forward, and she waves him on.

“So, you wanted to talk?”

“Something like that. For what it’s worth, I wanted to express my condolences.”

“I didn’t know any of them personally.” Shepard doesn’t mean to sound so harsh, so indifferent, but she does.

“Condolences perhaps less for your loss and more for what you've been asked to endure,” Thane continues, and Shepard can tell he’s choosing his words very carefully as he sits across from her once more. “Your friend Garrus was, shall we say, more than a little angry that the task had been placed on you. From what little comments he made, it doesn’t seem a request like that should be asked of anyone. He almost followed you down to the planet’s surface.”

That catches Shepard’s attention enough for her to look back up at Thane, to meet the black eyes which are somehow luminous even in the darkness.

"Really."

“It was your ship’s doctor who convinced him to stand down.”

“I’d like to have seen that,” Shepard mutters. “She’s probably the only one on this ship who could’ve managed it. I’m glad he didn’t.”

“You seem to operate alone.”

For lack of any defense that wouldn’t involve a blatant reveal of personal trauma, Shepard merely shrugs. “Any other planet, I’d have taken him with me. Hell, I’d probably have taken you. Nobody would’ve been able to touch me.”

“I’m assuming Alchera is nonhostile?”

“It’s a graveyard,” Shepard says. “All snow and ice. Nothing grows there. Nothing lives there. There was no reason to take anyone with me.”

“From what I understand, your mission was of an inherently sentimental nature," Thane comments. “Why bear it alone?”

“Panicking when the message came through proved to me that I can’t go at this with a clear head. If I can’t, I want as few people around as possible when I’ve got no choice but to confront it.”

“An island?”

“A commander.” Shepard corrects him with just the tiniest edge to her voice, and Thane has to respect her stance on the matter. He lets the comment stand for a moment or two before lacing his fingers together and appraising her with a look that is, feasibly, not quite as detached as it had been before.

“Perhaps it is not my place to say, but…putting the dead to rest? Gaining some closure for their families? It was a brave thing to do, Shepard. I doubt many people would have the courage to walk over their own graves, especially when they’ve already been, shall we say, exhumed.”

“It’s not like I could have said no,” Shepard admits. “I was asked, sure, but I couldn’t say no. Half the reason Hackett sent me down there was to get the tags so we could get them back to their families.”

“And those?” Thane asks, gesturing to the tags Shepard clutches between her fingers. “Someone with no next of kin?"

"Not exactly," Shepard laughs humorlessly. “These are mine. Were…mine.”

Several moments pass with nothing but the rhythmic hum of the ship to stand in for their conversation or lack thereof.

“You ever see Garrus’s visor?” Shepard asks him, rubbing the tags together between her fingers. “I mean, really see it up close?”

“I can’t say that I have. He and I have never been in close enough quarters.”

“It looks smooth from far enough back, but it’s got carvings all along the surface.”

_More now than before,_ she adds silently.

“People he’s lost,” Thane says carefully, taking a guess but knowing that it is not his place to know the specifics.

“He carries them with them wherever he goes. Can't say much without telling someone else's story, but…when Garrus goes into battle, he never goes alone.”

“Taking the spirits with him.”

“Would seem that way. I’ve lost a lot of people, but I’ve never thought to do that,” Shepard goes on. “Didn’t know if I’d have enough room on the tags to even start. Didn’t want to think about the possibility that one day I might run out. After the Citadel, though, it changed. I started carrying my near-deaths with me instead of people I’d lost. Kind of a reminder of all the times I’d come close and walked out. Because the whole time—learning about the Reapers, speaking with Sovereign, fighting Saren—I always thought that might be the one that I wouldn’t walk away from. You always think, going into a fight like that, that it could be your last. And you accept it, and you do what you can, and you either come home or you don’t. But…Saren was the first time since Akuze I was pretty damn sure I wasn’t going to make it home.”

Thane nods, noticing that, as Shepard speaks, her eyes are slowly trailing from meeting his to focusing on some point just beyond his head. She can’t, or won’t, look directly at him while airing the subject. Shepard goes on to recount the story of carving into her tags and the brief reasoning behind each. All the while, her voice is carefully monotone, and Thane doesn’t so much as shift in his seat for fear of halting her confession.

“When I woke up in that Cerberus med-bay,” Shepard finishes, “I was wearing my tags. I didn't even think to check that they were the ones I'd been wearing before. There was so much going on. I barely had time to grab my gear and make it out of there alive. Why would I bother obsessing over something so small? But…it seems, that the Shepard that went down on Alchera is not the same one that came back.”

“Shepard,” Thane says. “Do you happen to have a knife on you?”

Shepard raises an eyebrow but obliges the request, reaching for the cargo pocket on her knee.

In a move performed slowly enough that it gives Shepard time to react, to recoil, Thane reaches across the table and gently pulls the tags from her grip, flipping them over on the table and carefully examining where the first two lines lie. He meets her eyes but says nothing, and when she does not stop him, he flicks open the knife and begins to etch a third line. When he has finished, he sets the knife aside and picks up the chain, allowing its segments to run along the ridges of his skin until he is holding it open wide enough to be placed around Shepard’s neck. When she leans forward, he gently slips the old tags over her head and lets them fall until they come to rest beside the new ones. Again, she won't look at him, but this time for an entirely different reason.

“The Shepard who died saving her crew is the Shepard who risked her life to stop Saren, who could very well have fallen to the Collectors, who is trying to prevent more from being taken," Thane says quietly. "Who you are now carries the burden of who you were before, but you are still yourself, Shepard, despite your death and maybe even because of it.”

When Shepard chances a look up at him, it's the first time she's ever seen him smile out of something more than lack of comfort, and she could almost swear the expression is genuine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you all know I'm terrible at sticking to deadlines? Because I absolutely am. Maybe I should aim for uploads once every other week instead of every week since this one took me ages to write and rewrite and fix. Anywho, a huge thank you to everyone reading, commenting, and/or leaving kudos. Thanks for sticking with me on this little self-salting journey.


	5. Chapter 5

The doors to the main battery hiss and pull open with a low, mechanical whirr, and, as Shepard suspected he would be, Garrus is there and tapping away at the keyboard, every so often flicking his hands up to tap something on the translucent orange screen. With a few rapid taps to save his work, he turns to meet her.

“Shepard. Need me for something?”

“Have you got a minute?”

He so very badly wants to say no, in a way that is less reflective of the state of their friendship and much more reflective of how he himself is doing. No amount of casual conversation will be stimulating enough to keep the ghosts at bay, but on the other hand, Shepard’s got the kind of look in her eye that promises oncoming danger, and Garrus could use a good fight.

Maybe it would be just like old times. He could do with some of that; they’d barely spoken since Omega.

Following the one deep and rather lengthy discussion in which Shepard had tried to explain her side of her involvement with Cerberus, and Garrus had admitted to thinking she was only a pre-death hallucination, their conversations had devolved into shop talk, weapon specs, and ship upgrades. Shepard had noticed the extra carvings in Garrus’s visor the moment she’d gotten close to him in that little bird’s nest of a watch, but she hadn’t dared ask who the names belonged to. Hints and vague mentions of what had happened on Omega hadn’t quite been enough for Shepard to piece it all together, but the way Garrus would suddenly change topics or make an excuse to get back to work whenever he accidentally found himself straying too close to the memories had left Shepard wondering what, exactly, had transpired.

For as little as Shepard knew about turians, she knew Garrus well enough to know that he wasn’t doing too well at all. She suspected he was barely sleeping, and his eating habits before all this had been a complete mystery to her anyways, but the more time he spent in that damn battery the less well-off he looked, and so things had fallen into a rhythm by which Shepard took Garrus with her on every mission she could. She wasn’t sure if she was helping him get back on the horse, or if mere distraction for a few hours every other day was even enough to make a difference, but every time she had the chance to pull him out of the battery, she did.

Still, they hadn’t talked. Between his crisis and hers, there wasn’t much to say.

They had taken on several missions since, but braving the wastelands of Tuchanka and Grunt’s rite of passage had been the thing that had come closest to bridging the gap between the two of them.

The moment had come when the first two waves of varren and klixen lay dead on the field, when all Shepard could hear was the ragged breathing of both Garrus and Grunt, the former turning slow circles to see where the next threat was coming from, the latter simply standing there in defiance, knowing the test wasn’t over but refusing to look any sort of nervous about the outcome. And then they’d heard it; the deep, rumbling sound of some great force trying to smash its way up from underground, and the thresher maw had made its grand entrance.

Seeing the maw just beyond the outskirts of the arena had set a grim, almost-bloodthirsty smile to Shepard’s face—an expression she all but managed to hide from Garrus, whose expression had initially been one of wariness but, upon seeing Shepard go a little primal, had matched her grinning snarl and slapped another clip into his rifle. In that moment, Shepard had at once tightened her grip around her weapon and become intensely aware of the two sets of tags around her neck, aware of the armor they provided more than any chest piece. This fight wasn’t going to be another etched line. This fight was, in some small way, going to be payback.

At one point, Shepard had gotten a bit too close, playing chicken with the thing as it reared back to launch another gob of acidic spit in her direction. All she had to do was time it perfectly, and she’d shoot it right in the tongue. In the split second that followed, Shepard had managed to land two shots and seen the rewarding way in which it writhed under the assault. As the acid went flinging past her, Shepard ducked behind one of the ruined pylons set in the center of the arena, realizing by the awful smell that she’d only dodged it by less than a foot.

“Spirits, Shepard!” Garrus had yelled, his voice both distorted over the comms and acutely loud to her right. “Watch yourself! All we have to do is survive this thing!”

“’Survive’ nothing,” Shepard had yelled back, moving from behind cover and firing off another few rounds. The next thing she’d heard was the brusque sound of Garrus’s laughter as he took cover opposite her and filled in the gaps of her shots with his own, and together with Grunt they'd brought the creature down.

It had been the first normal interaction between the two of them in quite literally years, and he’d seemed like his old self for the rest of the mission, but upon returning to the Normandy, Garrus had made a few quickly muttered excuses and disappeared back into the battery. In truth, he was afraid that if he became too much like his old self, Shepard would disarm him with that oddly balanced combination of a commander’s gruffness and a best friend’s intrigue, that her silence would create exactly the environment he needed to talk. And talking was absolutely out of the question **.** He’d sooner face his own death in battle than he would any sort of pity or concern, and so, as Shepard stands there asking for a minute, he obliges her.

“Make it two, Shepard. What’s on your mind?”

“We’ve got eyes on a Collector ship,” Shepard says. “A turian patrol managed to disable it, and Cerberus wants us to dock and have a look around. See if we can get any information on where their homeworld is and how to get there. Preferably, how to get there and get back in one piece.”

“Cerberus does?” Garrus asks, and Shepard can tell he’s trying to tease her, to fake some sort of normal conversation, but his subharmonics tip her off: He’s suspicious.

“Okay, I do,” she amends. “Cerberus tipped me off, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful. Long story short, he’s—they’re—sending me into the belly of this thing. If there are any colonists left, we might be able to save them. If not…well, then we better get all the information we can to make their deaths count. It’s going to be nasty. You in?”

“Couldn’t keep me away.”

“Joker’s already got us en route. Make it ten.”

“Ten it is,” Garrus says, and Shepard makes to leave but almost instantly he calls for her to stop.

“Shepard…hold up a minute.”

As per their last substantial conversation, Shepard wonders if he’s about to turn his back on her to give himself the freedom to speak without his face betraying him, but he doesn’t.

“I know you’re still...not entirely comfortable with how you got back here. The whole Cerberus thing. I know there are a lot of people still not trusting you, and I don’t want you to think I’m one of them. I’m not saying you’re in their pocket for wanting to go check out this Collector ship. It might be the best chance we’ve got of making it out of this thing alive. But…people ordering you around for their own gain seems to be a habit everyone’s forming with you. I just don’t want you getting hurt.”

Shepard knows it’s not the time for sentiment. Even if they weren’t ten minutes out from a Collector ship, it wouldn’t be the time for sentiment. Not yet. The last thing Garrus needed to feel was that every time he opened up he would have nothing but coddling waiting for him, and so Shepard does the only thing she can think to do: Prove that she’s never had any doubt in him either.

A wide, brash grin plays on her face. “Hell, Garrus, what have I got to worry about if you’re there cherry-picking heads before they even know what hit them?”

She claps him on the shoulder—a gesture which works more in theory than in practice due to their respective builds—and heads for the doors.

Unsure footing or not, Garrus was the one person Shepard knew she could count on to have her back, the type to put personal matters aside until they were both safe again, and reaffirming that for the both of them had been—at least from her end of things—incredibly comforting.

Now there is the matter of Thane.

Infiltrating the unknown of the Collector ship was going to be a new experience for the both of them, both in environment, level of danger, and the fact that up to now they’d had yet to see combat fighting side by side. Due to the responsibilities and commitments of both Mordin and Grunt, Tuchanka had been Shepard’s most recent priority, and neither had found the assassin in tow.

On the non-professional side of things, Shepard isn’t sure what kind of response she’ll get when she walks into life support and asks for his company, as their roles with each other had become even less easily defined.

She’d woken up the morning after Alchera and their long night in the mess and had wondered if the whole thing hadn't been a kind of fever dream. From the moment she’d seen Thane clasp his hands together in prayer over Nassana’s body, some switch had gone off in her head. It wasn’t a morbid attraction by any means; Shepard had seen more than enough murder and death in her own life to ever be anything other than purposefully calloused against her own deeds and the deeds of those that stood at her side. But the Thane that had walked into the mess was at once different and the same from the one she’d seen drop from the ceiling and take out an entire team as if it were effortless. He seemed less sure of himself off the battlefield than on, and beneath it all there was the kind of silence and pensiveness that spoke of heaviness, of scars. Shepard found herself reminded of the same kind of weight she’d perceived in Garrus when she’d first seen him without his visor.

She stands outside of the door to life support, just beyond the optical reach of the scanners which would detect her presence and let her in, almost as if she could stare down a slab of mechanized metal long enough to gain her courage.

There are typical excuses running through Shepard’s head, blaming her honesty on exhaustion, but to even think such a thing would almost disown her appreciation for the night spent with him, free to be human instead of a commander. Then there are concerns of code, of conduct. He is a member of her team and she little more than his employer, even less than that when she considers he's lending his talents for free. In the strictest of terms she owes him nothing, and, outside the context of honor, he owes her even less. But to make excuses or brush aside what had happened was to dishonor him and the kindness he’d extended—something which, Shepard suspects, is not something he does very often. In the same way one must know the name for an illness before one can know how to treat it, Shepard wants to know why he had come to her, and why she had wanted him to.

 _Because,_ whispers the voice in her head, _he’s a man of faith, and he seems to have faith in you._

Shepard steps forward and the doors slide open to reveal a sparsely furnished room, barely more than a desk and lamp, and she finds Thane sitting with his back to her, hands folded together.

“You settled in all right?” Shepard asks, never breaching the doorway as she looks around the room.

“Indeed, Shepard,” he responds, tilting his head so his voice will carry. “Do you need something?”

“Have you got a minute?”

“Of course.”

It’s more warmth than she was expecting, but still he is guarded, and when Shepard rounds the table she does not take a seat. Briefly, she recounts the information from Cerberus and their current mission to raid the Collector vessel's data banks. Her thoughts are succinct and her voice is formal, and Thane is almost taken aback by this new Shepard, the Shepard who he knew about for years before her presence had graced him. The woman who worked as the angels did in her fierceness and her duty to protect.

“We’ve been told the ship is disabled,” Shepard says, finishing up. “But I’ve seen what they can do. Taking the fight to them on some neutral ground is one thing; walking onto one of their ships is another. It’s going to be dangerous. I want you in the landing party.”

“Certainly, Shepard.”

“And you’re feeling up to it?”

“You needn’t treat me as a liability, Shepard,” Thane says, and is she imagining it, or is there a bit of an edge to his voice? “As I’ve said, my illness won’t be a hindrance to anyone until long after this mission has been completed.”

By the steel in Shepard’s eyes, he is unsure if he’s overstepped his boundaries, but when she speaks, her words are anything but offended.

“Let me be straight with you,” Shepard responds, crossing her arms. “Back on Illium, when I asked you if you were sick, and even now when I ask you if you’re feeling up to it, it’s because I want to know. Not because I’m calculating the cost of bringing you onboard or the risks of taking you with me. You’re more than just an asset, Thane; you’re a member of my crew. And while you’re here, if you need something, I want you to tell me. Are we clear?”

“Very clear, Shepard," he says, and she's moderately satisfied to hear that he sounds taken aback. "Thank you.”

“Bay in ten,” she tells him, and, uncrossing her arms, she strides out of the room.

* * *

The moment Shepard sets foot on the Collector ship, she knows something’s wrong.

Even EDI’s scanner reads hadn’t been much comfort. The systems being offline and the thrusters being cold offered no reassurance; even the drive core being offline said nothing of those who might or might not be lurking onboard. If the ship had taken enough damage to disable its mechanics, it was reasonable to assume that those onboard would either have died in the onslaught or abandoned ship, but Shepard's still on edge.

Under EDI’s guide, she makes her way down the first main hallway, unable to ignore Garrus’s comparing the place to a hive. It brings to mind giant insects and makes her skin crawl, though, Shepard must admit, his comparisons both to the structure and its inhabitants’ physiology is not entirely wrong.

The stench is what hits her first as she raises her weapon and hears the others do the same. It’s cold but putrid; even the freezing cold of deep space hadn’t been enough to dull the decaying stench that wafts from the open mouth of the ship.

EDI’s voice comes to Shepard once again.

“…It is the vessel you encountered on Horizon.”

Shepard and Thane look to each other at the same moment, her mind bursting with possibility and his, seemingly, aware of her train of thought.

“Your human colonists.”

“They might be alive,” she responds.

“I wouldn’t count on it, Shepard,” he says, as if trying to cushion her towards some future blow, but it is an inevitability that Shepard’s already prepared for.

“Let’s get moving.”

The sight of the pods, busted open and smoking, is the first sign that Thane might be right. The second sign presents itself in the form of several piles of bodies, each a shapeless conglomeration of arms and legs, tufts of hair and bloody scalps. The remains of who these people had been are still wearing clothes, many wearing armor. Shepard hates to think they were the first to run out and try to stave off the attack, but there is little evidence to support anything else.

Garrus spots them before Shepard does.

“This looks bad,” he mutters, lowering his gun as they approach the first pile. “Spirits.”

Shepard is grateful that all she feels in the moment is rage. She got little done when she was despondent, but anger was a great driving force. She could move mountains when she was angry enough. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Thane bow his head, and though he maintains a tight grip on his weapon, she sees his lips moving silently. He is quick, and even Shepard—someone inherently unfamiliar with his rituals and rites—can tell he’s praying at double speed, leaving none of the reverent pauses intact but still offering some words for the fallen.

It is no better when they get to the mutilated Collector, and EDI’s entire monologue runs uninterrupted, for Shepard can think of no intelligent questions outside of her own shock. Under the weighty implications of it all, Garrus has nothing to offer, and if Thane feels any sort of pity for the creature in front of them, he doesn’t show it.

The pods on the ceiling come into full view all at once, their terrible, shimmering insides illuminated by some light source farther on within the ship itself, and Shepard immediately knows what they are. The faint silhouettes visible in some of them confirm her suspicions. There is nothing but a horrible, empty silence as the three of them look up on the pods, and whether it would be worse to find the inhabitants alive or dead Shepard can’t make up her mind.

“I detect no signs of life in the pods, Shepard,” EDI chimes in, as if sensing the unspoken debate.

“Hope it was quick,” Garrus mutters.

“It is probable the victims inside died when the ship lost primary power.”

“Not much of a comfort,” Thane remarks. “Who knows what they were forced to endure beforehand.”

Shepard doesn’t want to think about it, and declines to comment, leading them forward through the ship and under dozens more of the pods, beginning her climb up the steep incline before Joker chimes in and is soon interrupted by EDI.

“…I compared the EM profile against the data recorded by the original Normandy two years ago. They are an exact match.”

That stops all three of them in their tracks, and when Garrus and Thane look to Shepard—either for direction or to gauge her reaction—they can’t quite decipher her expression. Shock, confusion, some anger, more than a bit of vengeance, but each plays out so subtly that none reign supreme.

“Shepard?”

She raises her gun, jamming the stock into her shoulder with newfound fire.

“Let’s move.”

* * *

Shepard is the last to make it into the shuttle, nearly shoving Garrus and Thane through the hatch as the Collector ship whirrs to life behind them. She all but flings herself into the pilot’s seat and stabs the button to close the door, not even bothering to strap in before she grabs the yoke and, urging the shuttle to life, gets them airborne and shooting off the platform towards the waiting Normandy.

They’ve barely docked before the ship itself is dodging and weaving through hostile space, and then, with a massive lurch as Shepard and her team are thrown backwards against the walls of the docking bay, the ship is out of sight.

By the time they’ve jumped to another system and the ship is cruising at a normal speed, the three of them have not bothered to climb to their feet for the twists and turns of the voyage so far.

Garrus is the first to recover, clambering to his feet despite the bulk of his armor, swaying for a moment as he finds his balance and then extends a hand down to Shepard, who takes it willingly.

“You good?” he asks, and she nods.

“I better get back to the battery, then,” Garrus makes excuse. “If you need me—”

“I know where to find you,” Shepard says. “Thanks for the backup.”

He turns and leaves the docking bay, out of sight for a full few moments before Shepard turns to find Thane still on the floor, uninjured but breathing perhaps a bit heavier than he normally would.

Instead of reaching down, Shepard takes a knee, lowering herself to where she is only a modicum higher, and extends her hand, which he takes. She makes no move to pull him to his feet, though, instead letting their hands stay clasped, and he looks up at her, perplexed.

“You good?” she asks him, and she can see him getting ready to answer her statement in a dismissive fashion, but when she raises an eyebrow at him, he smiles instead.

“I am,” he says.

“Good,” she says, and hauls him to his feet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, a super big thank you to everyone reading, commenting, and leaving kudos!


End file.
